The Titanic: End of a Dream - 1980

Front Cover, The Titanic: End of a Dream - The Complete, Definitive Stroy from the Doomed Voyage to the Spectacular Discovery of the Wreckage

Front Cover, The Titanic: End of a Dream - The Complete, Definitive Stroy from the Doomed Voyage to the Spectacular Discovery of the Wreckage © 1979/1986. GGA Image ID # 10d44c4527

Excerpts from the Preface

For seventy-five years, the R.M.S. Titanic has possessed a nautical mystique second only to that of Noah’s Ark. The inaccessibility of the Titanic's wreckage, resting some two miles deep in the North Atlantic, has seemed only to increase the ship’s strange pull on our imaginations.

With the newsbreaking discovery of the Titanic's grave in 1985, we have relearned what our grandparents always knew: that there is something very special about the Titanic—something otherworldly and numinous that exploration of the wreck by manned submarine is just as likely to enhance as to dispel.

This book focuses on the American inquiry held immediately after the shipwreck, an investigation as misunderstood as it has been misrepresented. Accordingly, I have not relied on the rehash of the accident conducted in London by the British Board of Trade—that is, with two exceptions.

The British testimony was used for the flashback in Chapter 8 relating Officer Lightoller’s conversation with the Titanic's captain shortly before the collision; and also for the goings- on aboard the Californian in Chapter 16.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Prologue.

Pilots of the Purple Twilight

PART ONE Midnight Crossing

  1. Monster Ship
  2. Bon Voyage
  3. The Backwash Ashore
  4. Homecoming
  5. Journey’s End

PART TWO The Investigation

  1. A Bobbing Sort of a Cuss
  2. The Congressional Limited
  3. The New York Hearings (1)
  4. The New York Hearings (2)
  5. Back in Washington
  6. Collision
  7. Calumny
  8. Twenty Boats and a Quiet Sea
  9. Dies Irae
  10. “Pull for the Shore, Sailor”
  11. The Californian Incident
  12. Corporate Culpability

PART THREE Sea Change

  1. “A New Birth of Vigilance”
  2. The American Inquiry and the Law
  3. End of a Dream

Feuilleton

Bibliography

Index

From the Back Cover

Back Cover, The Titanic: End of a Dream - The Complete, Definitive Stroy from the Doomed Voyage to the Spectacular Discovery of the Wreckage

Back Cover, The Titanic: End of a Dream - The Complete, Definitive Stroy from the Doomed Voyage to the Spectacular Discovery of the Wreckage © 1979/1986. GGA Image ID # 10d47ed898

Eighty years later, the world continues to speculate about this great sea disaster

On that fatal April night in 1912, the world's largest moving object disappeared beneath the waters of the North Atlantic in less than three hours. Why was the ship sailing through waters well known to be a "mass of floating ice"? Why were there too few lifeboats, so that 1,522 people were left to perish at sea? Why were a third of the survivors members of the crew?

Based on the sensational evidence of the U.S. Senate hearings, eyewitness accounts of survivors, and the results of the 1985 Woods Hole expedition that located and photographed the ship, this electrifying account vividly recreates the doomed vessel's last desperate hours afloat and fully addresses the questions that have continued to haunt the tragedy of the Titanic.

Cover design by Todd Radom

Cover photograph of Willy Stoewer painting/UPI Bettmann

Library of Congress Catalog Listing

  • Main title: The Titanic, end of a dream / Wyn Craig Wade.
  • Published/Created: Harmondsworth, Eng. ; New York : Penguin Books, 1980, c1979.
  • Description: 489 p., [4] leaves of plates : ill. ; 28 cm.
  • ISBN: 0140055622 (pbk.)
  • LC classification: G530.T6 W32 1980
  • LC Subjects: Titanic (Steamship)
  • Notes: Includes index. Bibliography: p. 456-474.
  • LCCN: 80011471
  • Dewey class no.: 909/.09631
  • Type of material: Book
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